Two Environmentalists Anger Their Brethren

Illustration: Dirk Fowler

For angry heretics on the run, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger sure know how to enjoy themselves. Sitting in a cozy Berkeley restaurant just a few blocks from San Francisco Bay, exchanging tasting notes on the vermentino ("cold white wine is so good with fatty, fried food," Shellenberger says), they recount with perverse pleasure, in tones almost as dry as the wine, how they've been branded as infidels by fellow environmentalists. It started in 2004, when they published their first Tom Paine-style essay accusing the movement's leaders of failing to deal effectively with the global warming crisis. "We thought that someone was going to take a swing at us," Shellenberger says. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope published withering counterattacks, and the two men were dubbed "the bad boys of American environmentalism" by author Bill McKibben.

Nordhaus, 41, and Shellenberger, 36, didn't set out to infuriate their former colleagues. On the contrary, they were good Berkeley citizens — partial to black clothing, into biking (Nordhaus) and yoga (Shellenberger), fluent in pinot noir. Above all, they were passionate about the environment. For the better part of a decade, they toiled in the green movement as consultants and political strategists, each hoping to change the world. Instead, the climate crisis changed the rules: It demanded a new way of framing the debate, and the pair became disillusioned when the environmental establishment stubbornly refused to adapt. That led to their fateful essay, with the not-so-subtle title The Death of Environmentalism. Overnight, the two became pariahs. And now, with the October publication of their first book, Break Through: From "The Death of Environmentalism" to the Politics of Possibility, they are going to face the full fury of enraged environmentalists. Pope, who has read the book, predicts that the reception from the movement "will be harshly negative."

Break Through is a fascinating hybrid: part call to arms, part policy paper, part philosophical treatise. (Name another book that gives equal time to Nietzsche, cognitive therapy, and fuel-economy legislation.) It takes aim at some of the environmental movement's biggest lions, including Kennedy and Al Gore. It belittles the Kyoto Protocol; it rips into best- selling social critics like Thomas Frank and Jared Diamond. But it also dismisses free marketeers who believe that unfettered markets alone can solve our carbon-emission woes. "If this book doesn't piss off a whole lot of conservatives and a whole lot of liberals, we've failed," Nordhaus says.

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The two have reimagined the underlying philosophy of environmentalism in a way that could win over many of its natural skeptics, from financially insecure Americans who view green activists as elitist snobs to the leaders of developing countries like Brazil, India, and China who think environmentalists want to stop economic growth just when they were about to get their share. Green groups may carp, but the truth is that the book could turn out to be the best thing to happen to environmentalism since Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

By its very nature, the environmental movement has always been antitechnology and antigrowth. Bikes are better than cars; open space is better than development; less is always more. As a result, its leaders have focused most of their antiglobal warming political energies on regulating carbon emissions and limiting domestic energy consumption. Noble aims, to be sure. There's just one problem: In dealing with global warming, these strategies haven't worked in the past and will not work any better in the future.

Consider the evidence: Since the Kyoto agreement, many of the 36 industrialized countries that committed to reducing emissions are not on track to meet even minimal goals — since 2000, their emissions have gone up, not down. And both China and India are building a slew of coal-burning plants as their economies explode. "If China burns all the coal that it is set to burn between now and 2050," Shellenberger says, "we are super-deeply fucked."

Even if every American SUV owner were to buy a hybrid tomorrow, that wouldn't come close to offsetting the environmental damage being perpetrated around the globe. In fact, all the standards, cap-and-trade limits, and emission reductions that environmentalists have been pushing for may slow, but will never reverse, global warming. And that is Nordhaus and Shellenberger's inconvenient truth. "There is simply no way we can achieve an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions," they write in their introduction, "without creating breakthrough technologies that do not pollute."

Environmentalists, therefore, have missed a huge opportunity. Rather than being leaders in solving the global climate crisis, they are content to be doomsayers and scolds. What Nordhaus and Shellenberger advocate is what might be called post-environmentalism, an ambitious new philosophy that isn't afraid to put people ahead of nature and to dream big about creating economic growth — neither of which environmentalists have been very good at. Their vision cuts across traditional political divides: It's pro-growth, pro-technology, and pro-environment. They have specific proposals about Brazilian rain forests, the auto industry, and global warming preparedness. But the heart of the book is its unabashed desire to create a new way to think about our problems. Just as computer technology fueled the economic boom that started in the mid '90s, greentech can drive the first boom of the new millennium. "Global warming," they write, "demands unleashing human power, creating a new economy, and remaking nature as we prepare for the future."

Unfortunately, technological revolutions don't come cheap. Nordhaus and Shellenberger argue passionately that the only appropriate response to the climate crisis is a federally funded, $300 billion Manhattan Project to rapidly develop new forms of greentech. Nothing short of that, they argue, can jump-start the transition to a green economy in time.

Nordhaus and Shellenberger began as actual tree huggers, meeting in 1997 on a campaign to save a Northern California redwood forest from a rapacious Texas tycoon. They came from very different backgrounds: Shellenberger was raised in Colorado by Mennonite parents, married young, and has two kids. Nordhaus grew up in an affluent and well-connected Washington, DC, family and is childless. But they've become the kind of close friends (Shellenberger was best man at Nordhaus' wedding last year) who spend so much time together they begin to look and sound alike.

Their break with mainstream environmentalism happened gradually. In 2003, Shellenberger was a lapsed academic turned progressive PR consultant with several promising political initiatives under his belt. Nordhaus was working as a polling consultant and a political strategist for environmental groups. In private conversations together, they began mulling over some very untraditional thoughts. What if the economic solution to global warming weren't a matter of putting on the brakes but of stepping on the gas? What if environmentalism's emphasis on limits and "not in my backyard" restrictions was hopelessly at odds with the average American's belief in a limitless future? With a handful of like-minded partners, they drafted the New Apollo project, the first version of their plan for a federally subsidized greening of the economy. They hired an economist to run the numbers and determined that a $300 billion government investment could call forth another $200 billion in private capital. (To prove their independence from traditional environmental politics, they picked someone who had worked for the Bush administration.)

The public loved the idea. In polls the two conducted, a New Apollo scale investment plan got a thumbs-up from practically every group, including, most surprisingly, non-college-educated males — classic Reagan Democrats — the very voters who are generally antitax, anti-government spending, and anti-environmentalist. In fact, instead of being a drawback, the scope of the project was a selling point.

Politicians, as well as labor and environmental groups, signed on. Nordhaus and Shellenberger even got the attention of John Kerry's campaign. Then nothing happened.

It soon became clear that the project conflicted with the shorter-term goals of those same interest groups, and ultimately the duo was asked by other environmental lobbyists to stop pushing the legislation in Congress. "Labor groups were interested in protecting existing jobs in the US rather than creating jobs in the new-energy economy," Shellenberger says. "Environmental groups were more concerned with regulatory limits on greenhouse gases and raising fuel-economy standards." They had tried to be strategic by forming a coalition of interest groups, but interest groups were, in fact, the problem.

Shellenberger and Nordhaus became convinced that as long as policy was shaped by special interests — including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club — there would be no policy other than short-term, narrowly focused fixes.

"There are two ways to change the world," Shellenberger says, this time in New York, over another glass of good wine. "One of them is just to talk a presidential candidate into it. Then he wins, and the whole world changes." That was Nordhaus and Shellenberger's tactic in 2004: Just persuade the Democratic leadership. But when Kerry lost and Congress remained in Republican hands, they started to rethink that strategy. "The other way is a paradigm shift. And that takes time."

That's where Break Through comes in. To promote the book, Nordhaus and Shellenberger will give a series of speeches around the country over the next several months. They'll use their nonprofit foundation, Breakthrough Institute, to fund further research. Oddly enough, they haven't coined a good name for their movement, a surprising lapse for a public relations expert and a political strategist. "We call it post-environmentalism," Nordhaus says. "But we really haven't come up with a word or phrase that fully captures exactly what this new politics is."

One would think that Silicon Valley, a short hop from the pair's Oakland office, would be the perfect ally in their crusade. The term cleantech is sweeping the Valley (see "The Great Green Boom," page 168), and $300 billion in federal R&D money should be a nice incentive. "Bill Joy gets it," Nordhaus says, but too many others don't. Many Valley players are leery of government programs, and they tend to take their policy cues from old-guard environmentalists, Shellenberger and Nordhaus have found. "They think this is all going to get done with a little cap and trade, and a few other policies. And the rest will be done by private capital!" Nordhaus says. The dollar investment that most Valley venture capitalists are talking about right now just isn't enough, they insist. We need hundreds of billions, not hundreds of millions.

Shellenberger shakes his head. "All these guys' education in computer science was underwritten by the fucking federal government!" he says. Yet when Silicon Valley tells the story of the Internet, the government's role is downplayed. "They think they invented the Internet," Nordhaus says. "But Intel doesn't exist and Google doesn't exist without massive federal government investment in computer science, the Internet, microchips!"

A month before publication, early reaction to Break Through is starting to roll in. Michael Pollan, who wrote the best seller The Omnivore's Dilemma, gave them a book-jacket blurb, as did Ross Gelbspan, author of the global warming jeremiad Boiling Point. And Adam Werbach, the former head of the Sierra Club (and a fellow dissident with his own heretical ideas), says, "They nailed it."

But Pope, the current Sierra Club chief, dismisses the new book as a rehash of Nordhaus and Shellenberger's 2004 essay. "Time has not been kind to their thesis," he says. "Our politics have changed very dramatically in the last five years." He says he now agrees that we need much more government funding of research and development ("Their investment plan is way too modest!") but thinks it can all be paid for through the auctioning of carbon permits. "They are not environmentalists," he says, and he's not really sure they are even progressives anymore.

"I'm halfway there with them," says McKibben, renowned activist and author of The End of Nature, "but I think environmentalism has done considerably better than they expected at getting global warming back on the front burner." He still questions their emphatic rejection of the politics of limits. "One part of dealing with the climate problem is investing, but another is figuring out how to quickly limit carbon dioxide by changing some of the things we're doing now."

The two authors respond with their usual feisty aplomb. "No environmentalist will say investment isn't important," Nordhaus says, "but look at what they are actually putting their resources into." He and Shellenberger are certain that the public will support massive government spending on greentech — bigger than anything the Sierra Club or Silicon Valley VCs are proposing — only if it is presented not as an attempt to rein in prosperity and economic growth but as a quantum leap for the global economy and climate. If they're wrong, Shellenberger and Nordhaus may be best remembered for tilting at windmills — when windmills were what they were fighting for all along.

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